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Many people think of opera as a European genre. Many of the great names of opera call to mind Vienna, or Paris, or Rome, rather than New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. But there is a tradition of opera in America that stretches back 150 years or more. As we have just passed the Fourth of July weekend, it seems like an appropriate time to take a look at American opera. (The fact that I have just found a superb site dedicated to just that topic is an additional plus...)
The first known performance of an opera by an American composer was in 1845, when William Henry Fry's Leonora debuted in Philadelphia. Many early American operas took classical or European stories for their subjects, resulting in operas such as The Doctor of Alcantara, Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, and Serapis. These mid-nineteenth century operas had their premieres in a number of cities, including Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. American Opera, American Subjects While some American operas, especially the early ones, did use traditional European stories for their subjects, almost from the beginning composers turned to specifically American topics. G. F. Bristow's Rip Van Winkle, which premiered in 1855, was among the first to use an American subject. By the end of the nineteenth century, operas had already covered such topics as Montezuma (Montezuma, Frederick Gleason, 1885), and Hawthorne's American classic The Scarlet Letter (Walter Damrosch, 1896). In the twentieth century, composers increasingly turned to American stories and themes, and - in later years - politics and current events. As the United States grew in size, wealth, and world standing, American composers focused on American life and American issues in addition to the European tradition. Scott Joplin's Treemonisha (composed around 1907, but not performed professionally until the 1970s) and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, among others, dealt with life among the poor African-Americans of the American South. Aaron Copland's The Tender Land looked at life on Midwestern farms, while Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street treated the world of working-class Italian-Americans in the city. Douglas Moore tackled the romance of Colorado's mining heyday - and its decline - in The Ballad of Baby Doe. American stories and folklore inspired opera, too; Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" are among the tales that were turned into opera. In recent years, political and news events have inspired composers, most notably John Adams, who created both Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer (inspired by the hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro). Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article All-American Opera in Opera & Operetta is owned by Katherine Bryant. Permission to republish All-American Opera in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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